Using fabric and other found objects, Eric N. Mack creates richly textured compositions that collapse the boundaries between fine art, fashion, and architecture. The artist identifies as a painter working in the medium of fabric, although his works frequently move away from the walls to synthesize painting with sculpture. Mack’s first one-person exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery opens on November 3rd, following the announcement of his representation in 2021 and his inclusion in four group exhibitions since 2020. In the past year, Mack has completed residencies at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, and the American Academy in Rome, and his site-specific installation Sarong is currently on display at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, through January 2024 as part of the group exhibition Chronorama Redux.
The centerpiece of Mack’s forthcoming exhibition will be a mobile-like hanging structure suspended from the ceiling and draped with swaths of multicolored fabrics. Propelled by the idea of a classical fountain, the materials flow like water in a self-sustaining cycle. Regeneration is significant to Mack’s process, which breathes new life into overlooked materials gathered from Italian couturiers, international marketplaces, and the streets of Harlem where he lives, employing excess and scarcity in his accumulation and combination of disparate parts.
A series of abstract assemblages will adorn the gallery walls. Constructed and arranged by Mack, the works are paintings in found fabric that sustain the physicality of each material. Mack considers the collection of fabrics in each work to function like an archive, preserving and presenting his chosen materials while drawing attention to how they age. Fine silks, suiting, and graphic prints jostle and jive, taut in some places and gently curving in others, their relative softness and saturation, heft or weightlessness, complementing a wide spectrum of vivid color.
Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union, NY and his MFA from Yale University, CT. In 2017, Mack was the recipient of the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award selected by artist Lorna Simpson and completed the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva Island, FL and an artist-in-residency at Delfina Foundation in London, UK. Institutional solo exhibitions include Lemme walk across the room, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2019); the BALTIC Artists’ Award 2017, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); and Eric Mack: Vogue Fabrics, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2017). Major group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Ungestalt, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2017); In the Abstract, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA (2017); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2017); Making & Unmaking: An exhibition curated by Duro Olowu, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2016); and Greater New York 2015, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2015). Mack’s work is in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
